Hello Everyone,
We have finally reached the Alpha milestone in The Riftbreaker's development, which means that the game can now be played from start to finish and that all of the key game features are in place and working. This is a very important moment because it allows us to take a step back and assess the work that is still left to be completed in order for the game to be ready for launch. There's not much time left in 2020 and it is obvious that we won't be able to finish the game within this year. We've never announced a firm release date because we are much more committed to quality than to arbitrary deadlines, we still won't be announcing a specific release date, but we are officially moving the launch window to 2021.
The progress so far.
Now let's take a moment to look at what we've achieved this year and what is still left to be done to release the game:
- Operation Alpha Test - March 18th - on that date we've finally started to send out closed Alpha keys to the members of our Discord community. It was a huge step forward as we started to receive enormous amounts of feedback that helped us to improve the game considerably. We've released tens of updates to the closed Alpha build that fixed numerous bugs as well as introduced quality of life and design improvements. Looking back we can surely say that this was a fantastic decision that helped us find problems that we wouldn't be able to find ourselves. We released a lot of substantial updates to the closed Alpha throughout the year. This has also resulted in a lot of additional work for the team and moved the release further. All in all, we believe that it's better to fix bugs before the game is released rather than with tons of hotfixes made in painful post-release crunch.
We introduced the closed Alpha testing phase with a Gameplay trailer that you can see here:
- Steam Festival Demo - June 16th - The results from the closed alpha testing have encouraged us to take part in the Steam Summer Festival. We've put a lot of effort into polishing a publicly available demo for everyone to enjoy, and once again we were blown away by the feedback that we received. The demo was downloaded more than fifty thousand times within the few days that it was available. The feedback was very positive, but there were numerous gameplay areas to improve on and polish even further.
- The Riftbreaker: Prologue - August 6th - After the Steam Festival demo was taken down we received hundreds of messages to bring it back and make it available for everyone to play. We gathered all of the feedback from the festival and polished that demo experience for another one and a half month to give you - The Riftbreaker: Prologue. A stand-alone story driven experience that shows the basic gameplay aspects of the game and also explains a bit of the Riftbreaker story. Both the Demo and the Prologue have received numerous updates throughout their lifecycle. We’re planning to further update both the content and the engine of the Prologue, up to the game’s launch and beyond. Up to this day the Prologue and the Demo experience were downloaded well more than three hundred thousand times. This is a jaw-dropping result, we have never expected so much popularity for this short experience. We received thousands of feedback messages and some of you have clocked in hundreds of hours in the demo/prologue. We’ve had countless discussions, on our social channels and especially on our Discord, about the game’s design and the content that we’re working on. All of this has reinforced our obligation not to disappoint you and to deliver the quality that you expect of us.
If you haven’t done that already you can download The Riftbreaker Prologue here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293860/The_Riftbreaker_Prologue/
- Base Building trailer - August 31st - Due to the ongoing COVID pandemic all physical gaming events have been canceled and/or moved online. The Riftbreaker took part in multiple such events and we tried to supply you with fresh content for all of them. One of the most important events of this summer was Gamescom Online. We prepared a special trailer for this occasion that showed a lot more about the base-building mechanisms within the game and how building remote outposts within the campaign is going to look like.
You can check it out here:
https://youtu.be/rJsu_ty5DnY
- DirectX 12 and next-gen rendering features - We’ve actually been working on this task since November 2019 and we are finally very close to showing it to the public. A new DirectX 12 renderer allowed us to optimize the game even further and to introduce additional rendering features that make the game look much better. We will be showcasing this tech throughout the coming month so stay tuned for big announcements very soon! We are planning to first do a round of closed alpha testing of the new features with the participants of our closed Alpha (The Riftbreakers). After we are sure that the new renderer doesn’t melt anyone’s PC we will roll out these changes to the publicly available Prologue. This update will also feature a number of gameplay improvements that we’ve been working on since pre-Alpha build 3.5 (max-range energy connectors from Starbugs with love).
If you’d like to join the Riftbreakers’ closed Alpha ranks then head on over to our Discord and register:
- COVID 19 - Unfortunately we can’t go over the list of important events for this year without talking about the raging pandemic. The game development industry has been one of the luckiest ones in this situation. We were working from our homes from February to May and while this worked more smoothly than we expected, we can’t say that this hasn’t slowed us down. Remote communication is not the same as a face to face meeting and precious time is consumed for additional synchronization efforts.
The COVID pandemic is coming back in force and it looks like this wave is much stronger than the previous one. Our Community Manager - Piotr “Voidreaver” Bomak tested positive for COVID-19 more than a week ago with heavy symptoms of the disease. He is currently undergoing treatment in a hospital in Szczecin and asked us to send you his warmest regards and a word of warning - please wear a mask, maintain proper hygiene and stay safe, this thing is serious.
Piotrek is fortunately getting better now and we all hope that he gets back to us in full health! We’ve moved back to “home office” work once again and it looks like it is going to stay that way for the unforeseeable future. In the mean time, if you miss Piotrek too much and can’t wait for him to return to regular streaming you can check out some of the video logs that he recorded while working from home during the previous lock-down phase:
What we're working on now.
This is already quite a lengthy post, but we promised you more information about what we are working on and what needs to be finished for The Riftbreaker to be ready for the release of version 1.0, so here it goes:
- Campaign mode - we currently have this module in a “feature complete” state which we read as - it can be played from start to finish. However, it is still quite far from being finished as we still lack a lot of content. Most of the missions are still undergoing deep gameplay changes. We’re implementing additional mechanics for unique plants and creatures that are going to change the way you play in the various biomes that you will be exploring. The game’s story-line is non-linear and you will be able to visit most areas of Galatea 37 in any order that you like. This design choice brings a lot of freedom and replayability to this procedurally generated world. It is also very demanding in terms of the work that needs to be done to make all of this work well together. We hope that you will all appreciate the extra work that we are pouring into this.
- Biomes - we’ve already shown you some snippets of the biomes that are going to be available in The Riftbreaker. We are still working on them though both in terms of their look & feel as well as the unique gameplay mechanics that are going to be present in all of them. We want you to really feel that you need to adapt to a different environment each time you go out to explore a new region of Galatea 37.
- New Creatures - the Prologue and the closed Alpha included three different hostile creature species each with three strains and a single boss creature. We’re planning to have about twenty different hostile creature species in the finished game (each with three strains) that are going to challenge your skills. Some of them will appear only in certain biomes while some of them will come out only if certain conditions are met. We’re already more than half-way through with this task and the work is speeding up as we expand our engine and our toolset. We will be revealing new species of creatures as we go by, so stay tuned for future announcements.
- New Weapons - the weapons arsenal that is currently available in the closed Alpha is already quite extensive, but we aren’t there yet ;) We are working on both additional ranged guns as well as new melee weapons. Would you like to see Mr Riggs with a power axe or a mighty shock hammer - we got you covered. We have most of the weapons modelled and textured (close to twenty, with four rarity levels each). We’re still working on the unique animations that are required by each melee weapon type as well as dual wielding different melee weapon types!(?). There’s also a couple of “unique” weapons in our plans. Lots of really cool toys to make your life on Galatea 37 that much more survivable :)
- New Skills - you didn’t think that the Dash skill was the only one that’s going to be in the game, right? Good, rest assured that we already have a couple of additional skills already implemented and a few still in the works. Would you fancy a cloaking device to explore the land uninterrupted?
- New Equipment - more mines, more traps, more buffs, additional utilities, portable towers. Yes, we like the word “more” (and “explosion”).
- New Buildings - the arsenal of towers that are available in the closed Alpha at the moment is quite timid. As we are adding new weapons for Mr Riggs we are also introducing their automated counterparts in the form of new towers. We are also going beyond that by adding more advanced and larger tower types.
- Alien Research - this research path hasn’t been introduced before. Downloading new invention blueprints from Earth you will only allow you to develop the base level of technology that’s available in the game. If you want to go further you will have to gather research specimens and study them in locally operated Alien Research Labs. These are an advanced building that requires a lot of power and a cooling liquid to operate. Things will get more interesting both in terms of how you plan out the structure of your base and your economy. The need to gathering research specimens will also power one of the game’s pillars - exploration.
- Extended modding for weapons and buildings - the modding implementation and balancing that you can currently experience in the closed Alpha is a very early vision of how we see this system being implemented. We are currently finishing work on adding modding capabilities to most building types which will expand the range of possibilities even further.
As you can see above, there’s still quite a bit of work left to be done. According to our plans, as soon as we finish all of the above plans the project will reach the Beta milestone - the game will be feature complete and content complete. We will then start more extensive gameplay testing and balancing with a broader number of closed Beta testers. Once again we won’t be stating any specific release dates for these development phases, but we will make sure to keep you in the loop with regular development updates and gameplay streams.
As always, we crave your feedback. If you’d like to have an open conversation with us about the game (or other topics), you can find us on any of our social channels:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
www.twitter.com/exorstudios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios